Particular embodiments generally relate to content advisory systems.
In digital and video broadcast, a content advisory system may be used to block what is considered to be objectionable content. A user may define preferences to block content based on ratings provided for the content. A “rating table” may be used that defines the ratings for a given country or geographic region. Such a regionalized rating table is called a Rating Region Table (RRT), or a region rating table. A rating table may be considered to have columns representing rating “dimensions,” where each dimension represents a different characteristic of the program content. Examples of rating dimensions include the amount and intensity of violence or sexual content, or the minimum age of the viewer. Each dimension may have a number of different rating “levels,” so that, for example, a number of different levels of violent content can be represented. For a violence dimension, rating levels could be “mild violence,” “moderate violence,” and “extreme graphic violence.”
A user may set preferences to block content by defining which ratings are acceptable. For example, a user may want to block any content that is age-rated at an age of 13 or above. The blocking limits are set using an index value that points to the column and row in the rating table. For example, the index value of (2, 1) corresponds to the rating defined by the column number 2 and row number 2. This index may correspond to an age of 13 or above in the rating table. At some point, the rating table may be changed in which dimensions or levels may be added or deleted. For example, the row of the age of 13 or above may be shifted to the index (2, 2) because a new age of 10 is added at index (2, 1). Because the user sets the preferences as a hard code to an index value, the content blocked is still at (2, 1), which is not age 13 or above. For example, it may now be a newly added level of age 10 or above.